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OH MY GOODNESS! I don't even know where to begin! I'm assuming the first room you can clear is 1E, but I don't even know how to do that! But this looks like an infinitly better maze than KDD's. So I'm going to give it a high rating.

quote:Ezlo wrote:
OH MY GOODNESS! I don't even know where to begin! I'm assuming the first room you can clear is 1E, but I don't even know how to do that! But this looks like an infinitly better maze than KDD's. So I'm going to give it a high rating.

Do you think you can judge a hold fairly by looking at like first few rooms? I think not.

Rooms have more than just the appearance. I've not looked at this one yet, but I would definitely wait until playing at least most of the hold before saying how good it is. Also, difficulty =/= overall rating. (Which, I think, a few people forget sometimes)

I solved... one room. I managed to cross another without getting killed once. And then I got stuck, completely.

...

Good. That means this one'll last me a while ^_^ Kudos on the artistic side of things on the whole... er... six rooms I've seen. I'm liking this one so far, at least. I foresee many, many pleasant hours of delving ahead.

Hold of the Year and Technical Design Excellence in Concept Award Winner (2008)Advanced Concepts - I made the Goblins, Fegundos, Eyes and Potions levels
(Tutorials and Challenges involving specific DROD elements)

I thought the rooms were okay, but there was way too much needless backtracking and generally too many tunnels, that made the level look messy and difficult to navigate.

I never enjoyed KDD L13 and I'll propably never enjoy maze levels unless they're built to avoid heavy backtracking and aren't full of dead ends. Tunnels and room edges just make it worse by making it more difficult to spot those. There were some nice shortcuts, like passing through 1S after completing it, but some areas were still hard to reach even after visiting them earlier.

It's not a bad hold, but I spent more time with it than I would've wanted to. And that's not because the puzzles were too tedious. (Btw, thumbs up for confusing me with 1S1E )

Fair point. However, my thinking was that since (a) the maze is only made of 9 rooms, (b) most rooms are immediately accessible, or at least only require one room completed before they are and (c) each room has deducible objectives (e.g. dropping green door/dropping red door/getting to a specific exit)...that would mean that the solution to the rooms and the maze as a whole could be deduced, requiring minimal trial and error or backtracking. Of course, just because that was my intention, it doesn't mean that's the way it ultimately worked out.
Well done for completing it, by the way.

____________________________
New to DROD? You may want to read this.
My Holds and Levels:

Hold of the Year and Technical Design Excellence in Concept Award Winner (2008)Advanced Concepts - I made the Goblins, Fegundos, Eyes and Potions levels
(Tutorials and Challenges involving specific DROD elements)

A very enjoyable little hold. I didn't find the maze overly confusing, certainly the different coloured tiles helped in that respect. There were a few "this is impossible" moments, but the satisfaction of working them out just adds to the enjoyment of the hold.

I look forward to playing your future holds.

____________________________
Without struggle, there is no progress, so get up, get out, and go make the rest of your life the best of your life; you deserve to live the life that YOU want to live...

This is the best hold I've played for quite some time. Not that that's such a big thing as I've only played a few of the newer holds. The difficulty level is just right for me, and I actually liked the maze structure. Ealry on,I had to use the restore screen to look where to go. By the time I had completed the ordinary rooms and went to look at the secret ones, I could navigate quite well from memory.

I'm not as fond of the other level, though. It's not bad by any means, but lacks IMO the fun factor of the maze. I've completed three of the rooms there so far.

I do have one small complaint. The checkpoints in 1N1E of the maze are badly placed. There are unnecessarily many in the central chamber. I would instead have wanted one NW of the orb near the first entrance.

On another thought, confusing might not be the best word to describe what I thought of the maze. None of the rooms were hard to figure out and it was usually clear where to go next. The problem was generally looking at the restore screen to find out how to get into the next destination. The paths cross room boundaries a lot, which makes it slower. I might have picked some inefficient routes that have to do with these thoughts as well. It's just repeating to have to go through the NW-part of 1W for the ~fifth time. Also, minimap is pretty much useless in maze levels full of 1-tile passages, unlike in most other holds. So restore screen is the only way to go without trial and error (which I did some too, because I got tired at looking at the restore screen again and again)

I see the rating of this hold dropped recently from 8.7 to 8.1. I hope my complaints didn't have much to do with that big change. That's just a personal opinion and you are allowed to disagree with it.

I'm always amazed at how Jacob manages to cram about 50 rooms into a 3x3 square.

To help navigate, I made a little webpage map (attached). If you're going to use it more than once, I'd suggest resaving it as a "complete webpage" or however the browser does it, just so you're not redownloading the images all the time.

quote:Rabscuttle wrote:
I'm always amazed at how Jacob manages to cram about 50 rooms into a 3x3 square.

To help navigate, I made a little webpage map (attached). If you're going to use it more than once, I'd suggest resaving it as a "complete webpage" or however the browser does it, just so you're not redownloading the images all the time.

Oh my... I had the exact same idea. Except that mine is a huge single 4MB in-game resolution using PNG image
(1.47Mb as a JPG and 1.23Mb as a RAR'ed JPG. Still pretty big)

I don't think I need to post it here, because you can just use Rabscuttle's link or manage it without a map. And I propably should resize it a little smaller anyway, because it's close to 2500x2100 pixels.[Last edited by Doom at 02-08-2006 04:51 PM : additional data]

Hmm... I donīt know how to rate this holds. The rooms where superb, but I did get very tired at all backtracking. I suppose that this is a very good hold if you donīt mind running around in a maze. Otherwise itīs just good

Hold of the Year and Technical Design Excellence in Concept Award Winner (2008)Advanced Concepts - I made the Goblins, Fegundos, Eyes and Potions levels
(Tutorials and Challenges involving specific DROD elements)

quote:Rabscuttle wrote:
To help navigate, I made a little webpage map (attached). If you're going to use it more than once, I'd suggest resaving it as a "complete webpage" or however the browser does it, just so you're not redownloading the images all the time.

I'm just now gettin' around to maneuvering through this hold, and tried to use this map . . . but the images weren't found by either IE or Firefox. Is this behavior experienced by anyone else, or am I somehow special?

quote:key-smiter wrote:
I'm just now gettin' around to maneuvering through this hold, and tried to use this map . . . but the images weren't found by either IE or Firefox. Is this behavior experienced by anyone else, or am I somehow special?

Nah, it's just that with the new server the URLs used in the HTML file have changed.

EDIT - although this is helpful, I still can't find my way around quite right. I've completed the entrance and 1N, and now that I've retraced my steps over and over I think I've determined I can only go where I've gone before. This is odd indeed . . . assuming there's a proper order for rooms, what's the next one I should be striving to attack? (Assuming, of course, that there's a way out of my stuckness.)[Last edited by key-smiter at 06-30-2006 01:55 PM]